Business technology news for Feb 13, 2008

Dell to Buy E-Mail Service to Better Compete With Rivals; Yahoo paid $160 million to acquire Maven Networks; Nokia Dominates, but its Rivals Insist That Could Change.

Read at http://www.unitedBIT.com

Ad Networks Are the New Dot-Coms

By Saul Hansell

 

It’s no longer enough to have a Web site. Blog software let absolutely everyone into that club. Now the way to fame and riches seems to be starting an advertising network.

In just the last two days, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, BuzzMetrics and ZoomInfo all said they would start ad networks. Most significantly, Facebook is preparing to start one that draws on the information it has about users.

Meanwhile, the existing networks are expanding. AOL just agreed to buy Quigo, which helps publishers sell advertising on their own sites. And Google, the biggest ad network by far, said it would start putting ads into videogames.

Martha Stewart has started Martha’s Circle,” a network that includes Apartment Therapy, 101 Cookbooks, Style Me Pretty and other sites that are “Martha-like in their aspirations and interests,” Wenda Harris Millard, the president of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, told Advertising Age.

For Martha, this is a way to leverage the company’s existing sales force and attract more attention from marketers because it can offer
them more reach.

Other sites are morphing their own business models to tap into the ad network craze. For example, ZoomInfo, a company that started out as a search engine for information about people, is now planning to use the data it gleans about people in a targeted ad network.

BuzzLogic is going the other way, trying to use software originally designed to help marketers find influential bloggers for advertising purposes. Its new ad network is meant to put advertisements next to discussions related to what they are trying to sell. Mortgage lenders, for example, can advertise on blogs talking about home buying.

Prediction 1: We’ll see dozens more ad networks announced in the next six months.

Prediction 2: 95 percent of them will be gone in two years.

Everyone who has ever sold advertising says that buyers like things to be simple. And the plethora of competing networks and technologies is anything but. Google has already proven that there is a powerful network effect to advertising. The more buyers and sellers in one place, the better prices for all.

Yes, there are some who argue that the rise of advertising exchanges, like Yahoo’s Right Media, will help make the market efficient for lots of players. That could be, but I’ll still stand by the idea that Google and a handful of others will end up with the vast bulk of the ad network business.

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Software for Rent

By GARY RIVLIN

Marc Benioff has never been modest in his dreams for Salesforce.com, the business software company he founded in 1999.

Mr. Benioff, whose appetite for brash publicity and business growth matches his bulk, declared several years ago that Salesforce would be “the Microsoft of the 21st century.” Never mind that his company brought in over a year what Microsoft garners in a few days. Or that another company, Google, seems more likely to wear that label.

Salesforce promised to revolutionize the way businesses buy software, and to a large extent it has accomplished that in one market niche: customer tracking. Its innovation was in turning software into a service that is leased over the Internet, instead of something bought and installed on company computers.

And yet for Mr. Benioff, the company’s chief executive, that is not enough. He wants to turn Salesforce into a platform like Microsoft’s Windows operating system, a product so popular that it is the foundation for a veritable ecosystem of software developers.

“In our industry,” he said, “the only companies that really make it big move from being a killer app to being a platform.”

But whether he can pull off that strategic leap is unclear. Salesforce has started to look less revolutionary as larger, more established companies have adopted its leasing model. And as Mr. Benioff himself notes, few software companies successfully make the move to platform status.

Yet that jump is critical to Salesforce’s long-term success. Its share price has tripled in three years, showing that investors are counting on success beyond the market for customer-tracking software.

“It’s been very impressive what Salesforce has pulled off,” said J. Bruce Daley, editor of The Enterprise Software Observer, an industry newsletter. “But I think this is a company about to hit a wall.”

Like others, Mr. Daley declared it “logical” that Mr. Benioff would try to use its beachhead in managing customer information to establish itself as a platform, a kind of holy grail of the software world. The plan is to persuade outside programmers to do what Salesforce cannot afford to do on its own: round out the company’s offering of products so that customers can lease a greater range of business tools, like payroll and accounting software.

“But the jury is still out on whether ultimately it will be successful,” Mr. Daley said.

It does not help Mr. Benioff’s cause that the subscription model’s success has inspired software firms, including Microsoft and SAP, the German business software giant, to offer subscription-based versions of their own products for customer relations management, known as C.R.M. That means Salesforce faces increased competition in its core market at a time when it is focusing on selling itself as a platform.

And then there is the competition from smaller companies like NetSuite, which uses the same leasing model to offer a full suite of applications it has built, including billing, accounting and other critical business tools.

Peter Goldmacher, an investment analyst for Cowen & Company, is among those arguing that Mr. Benioff should — at least for the time being — throttle back his wider ambitions and stick to his primary business. Mr. Goldmacher was once among Salesforce’s most prominent Wall Street boosters, but he has tempered that enthusiasm.

“My concern is that this is a company letting itself get distracted,” Mr. Goldmacher said.

In the late 1990s, Salesforce was one of a group of start-ups exploring ways to capture a share of the lucrative business software market using the leasing model, also called “software as a service” and “on-demand computing.”

The leasing model, its supporters say, permits companies to avoid the expense and headache of installing complex software packages that typically require huge outlays of cash for hardware and software upgrades.

“It’s all about letting our customers pay attention to innovation and not infrastructure,” Mr. Benioff said. “Software as a service is about freeing them from having to hook up another computer in another data center to another database to another application server to another security server.”

In the battle for a share of business software dollars, Mr. Benioff chose to focus on customer relationship management tools, a relatively small corner of the market. Such software would help sales representatives track customers and potential customers.

“C.R.M. seemed a perfect place to start and prove our concept,” he said.

By contrast, NetSuite focused on creating an on-demand financial product that handles tasks like billing and accounting precisely because they are so central to a business.

“Our strategy has always been to be the application you run your business on,” said Zachary A. Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite. “Salesforce chose an easier route.”

Though the two companies were started within weeks of each other, Salesforce has 35,000 customers, compared with NetSuite’s 5,300. But Mr. Nelson said he sees a strength in those numbers. “The same reason companies are slow to come makes them slower to leave,” Mr. Nelson said.

In response, Mr. Benioff described NetSuite as “not worth talking about,” given its relatively small size. Instead, he was eager to discuss larger companies like Microsoft and SAP, and he said their moves to on-demand software are a testament to Salesforce’s success.

In September, Microsoft started selling Dynamics CRM Live, an on-demand version of Dynamics CRM, the shrink-wrapped software package the company has been selling for four years. At around the same time, SAP unveiled Business ByDesign, an online version of the company’s array of business software, aimed at medium-size businesses.

At a news conference to promote that product, Henning Kagermann, SAP’s chief executive, declared ByDesign “the most important announcement I’ve made in my career.” But those who follow the business software market are generally skeptical that SAP, a company whose sales staff has thrived on selling multimillion-dollar software packages, will be as aggressive offering a cheaper version of its own product line.

These same analysts, though, tend to be more bullish about Microsoft’s chances against Salesforce.

Mr. Benioff dismissed Microsoft’s offering as “an inferior product,” but analysts said that Microsoft needed only a strong offering, not a superior one.

“If you know how to use any of Microsoft’s desktop tools, you know how to use Microsoft’s C.R.M. product,” said Bruce Richardson, the vice president for research at AMR Research, a technology consulting firm. Microsoft is a minor player in the C.R.M. market, but its Office software suite is installed on hundreds of millions of computers. And the company has priced the on-demand version of its C.R.M. software to be significantly cheaper than Salesforce’s offering.

“That’s classic Microsoft: to aggressively attack from a position of weakness to gain market share,” said Mr. Goldmacher of Cowen & Company.

Mr. Goldmacher had high hopes for Salesforce when the company went public in 2004. But he has cooled on the company since then; he said that over the last 18 months, Salesforce has lost its focus.

“More and more, I see them chasing bigger opportunities that won’t necessarily pay off,” said Mr. Goldmacher, who now has a neutral rating on Salesforce’s stock.

“What they’re telling the Street is, ‘We don’t care about profitability,’” Mr. Goldmacher said. “Their story now is that C.R.M. is just the bait, and the platform the real hook.”

Despite $497 million in sales, Salesforce posted a loss of $3.6 million last year.

Mr. Benioff counters critics by noting that although the platform project is less than two years old, the company is selling more than 700 add-ons, most of them written by third parties. Salesforce, working with a pair of venture firms in Silicon Valley, has created a $25 million fund that will provide seed money to companies seeking to build applications for the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce has also entered into a series of partnerships with Google, hoping to ride whatever success that company has in social networking and office applications, a field now dominated by Microsoft.

Many of the add-ons require customers to download additional software, which waters down Mr. Benioff’s simplicity message but also could make customers more loyal.

“The more our users customize, the more they are tied to our service,” said Steve Fisher, the Salesforce executive overseeing the platform project.

Another issue is that Salesforce is mainly used by sales staff needing to keep track of leads and customer lists. To AMR’s Bruce Richardson, that is not a very large step toward empire building.

“Marc wants to be the Facebook of the enterprise, but he’s missing a key piece,” Mr. Richardson said — a core product so popular that it naturally grows into an environment that attracts hundreds of third-party software vendors.

That is where the company’s partnerships with Google might prove critical.

“Marc is waiting for Google applications to mature,” said one former Salesforce executive, who asked not to be identified. “If it can link with Google applications, then maybe Salesforce can develop into a platform.”

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More Jobs Being Found Online, but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Easy

By BARBARA WHITAKER

One of the first things Brooke Christiansen did as college graduation neared last spring was post her résumé on three of the largest Internet job boards: Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs.

For the most part, she said, it was an exercise in frustration.

“You get piles and piles of jobs that no matter what you type in, come up with every single search,” she said. “It’s very hard and very time-consuming to find something you’re actually interested in.”

In addition, she said, it is rare to hear back when applying for jobs found on the sites.

Mary Riley Dikel, creator of The Riley Guide, a directory of employment and career resources on the Internet, said: “One job seeker told me, ‘I think I’d be more successful distributing my résumé by opening my window and throwing it out.’ You do feel like you’re going into a black hole.”

To that frustration, add the risk that identity thieves may steal information from résumés posted on job sites – and to estimates that only 3 percent to 5 percent of job seekers find employment through the sites – and it is reasonable to ask, Why bother?

Recruiters and career counselors typically turn the question around and ask, Why not? Applicants, they say, need to recognize that job boards are but one tool among many that can be used to find work.

“The Internet is an absolutely necessary tool in your job search arsenal, but it’s not your only tool,” Ms. Dikel said. “Use Monster and professional associations and local and state job boards and other things that target what you want. But if you’re spending more than 15 minutes on the Internet, you’re lost.”

A proliferation of new sites – many capitalizing on search engine technology to provide job offerings from across the Internet – are giving job seekers some new alternatives to explore.

Among them are JobCentral.com, a site developed for major corporations that carries their listings as well as direct links to the companies’ Web sites to apply for jobs. The
board was created after executives from corporations like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Intel began exploring ways to deal with the ever-escalating fees charged by the largest job boards.

Initially, 18 companies put in $60,000 each to finance the board. Now companies pay $12,500 a year to post all their jobs, or $25 a job (compared with as much as $400 a job on a major board), said Bill Warren, executive director of the DirectEmployers Association, the corporate group behind JobCentral. It now has 182 member companies. The site also acts as a search engine, scavenging job listings from about 1,400 nonmember companies.

Taking a slightly different tack are sites like Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com, which rely on search engines to aggregate a vast array of listings from newspaper classified ads, job boards, corporate sites and trade associations.

The field will expand again tomorrow, when JobCentral, Indeed, SimplyHired and Google Base, a database recently introduced by the search engine company, are to announce that they are teaming up to create a national labor exchange at JobCentral.com. The site, which has about 340,000 jobs posted, will incorporate jobs found by its partners and provide the technology to let those sites link to its information. Mr. Warren, creator of the job site that later became Monster, said the alliance would result in the amassing of information on about 4.5 million jobs.

“The benefit to the job applicant is that they can go to one place and basically see all the jobs on the Internet,” Mr. Warren said.

How that will affect the three major job boards – and the state of finding jobs on the Internet – remains to be seen.

Mark Mehler, a co-founder of CareerXroads, a New Jersey company that advises companies on using technology in recruiting, said the traditional job boards might find themselves at a disadvantage. It has become expensive for companies to post employment ads on the major boards, and the number of résumés posted can be overwhelming.

At the same time, he said, it remains to be seen how useful and reliable the sites that pull job listings from across the Web will be.

“They key is freshness and where the job is being taken from,” he said. Despite such problems, studies indicate that an increasing number of people are being hired through Web postings and employee referrals, rather than through traditional methods like printed want ads.

In 2004, a study by CareerXroads found that 61 percent of hires by the companies surveyed came from referrals or the Internet, up from 50 percent two years earlier. According to the study findings, Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs accounted for 22.8 percent of the hires attributed to the Internet; corporations also reported that a high percentages of employees were hired after filing applications on corporate sites.

Eric Muller, a recruiting manager with the Southern Company, an energy company based in Atlanta, says his company initially began using  JobCentral because it allowed the company to post all its jobs at a lower cost and because it provided a direct link to the company’s site. While the company still uses big boards like Monster and CareerBuilder, he said, they do so more strategically – if, for instance, a job needs to be filled immediately. “We have to have a mix,” he said. “I can’t have all my eggs in one basket.”

The same holds true for job seekers, although there are increasing questions about the wisdom of posting résumés on the Internet.

“Putting a résumé on an online job site is not the smartest way to go about getting a job,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit group that educates consumers about technology and privacy.

The forum put hundreds of résumés on job sites and tracked them for a year. Ms. Dixon said many were stolen by either criminals or unethical recruiters.

One common ruse preys on midcareer professionals whose résumé history can be combined with a Social Security number, resulting in identity theft.

“The more detailed your résumé, the easier it is to do,” Ms. Dixon said.

Job seekers who posted online said they had also had problems with employment consultants seeking to solicit business. After arranging an interview, the consultants begin making a pitch for their services, which can cost as much as $10,000.

Ultimately, Ms. Christiansen found exactly what she was looking for – a human resources job near Chicago – using JobCentral. She said the site helped her narrow her search, and after that she found a job quickly. “It can work,” she said, “if you know exactly what you’re looking for and you can find a place that will have it.”

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Listing Top Jobs but Charging Candidates to Seek Them

By BOB TEDESCHI

RECRUITERS with six-figure jobs to fill know better than to post them online and start a stampede of marginally qualified job seekers. But they also know that the Web is the easiest way to find applicants.

The Web’s surprising answer to the problem? Charge them to look.

A growing number of niche sites devoted to high-end jobs are finding that applicants are willing to shell out a few dollars — or a few hundred, in some cases — for the chance to get access to job ads. The strategy will not help the big online job boards find more applicants for entry-level positions, but analysts say it is ideal for sites like TheLadders.com, ExecuNet and others seeking the senior executive crowd.

“It turns out that having the job candidates pay is a great screener, and employers love it,” said Charlene Li, an Internet analyst with Forrester Research.

Ms. Li said that the online employment category, which is dominated by Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo’s HotJobs, is expected to generate about $1.9 billion in revenue this year, up from about $1.6 billion last year. But she said that the category in recent years has undergone an explosion in the number of job boards that serve specific niches. (Industry executives say that there are roughly 40,000 job boards online.)

The upper-level jobs niche has been slower to develop, though, because companies typically hand off such jobs to corporate recruiting firms. Those firms, like DHR International and Korn/Ferry International, set up their own Web sites, but those sites are used mainly to market the firms’ offline services instead of connecting applicants with companies online.

To fill that void, several former HotJobs executives introduced TheLadders.com in 2003, with the mission of posting only those jobs with annual salaries of $100,000 or more. At the time, the company made an odd bet — that it could attract more applicants if it charged them a monthly entry fee of $30.

That is precisely the opposite of the approach used by mass-market employment sites, which charge applicants nothing but charge companies varying fees to post job openings.

In its early years, TheLadders.com was slow to grow, partly because it did not attract enough job postings to justify the site’s cost. But as employers and corporate recruiters learned that they could find qualified applicants for nothing, the number of job postings jumped.

Now, according to Marc Cenedella, the chief executive of TheLadders.com, the site listed 70,000 jobs last week and is on pace to exceed $30 million in sales this year from about 1.4 million subscribers. And the site now counts Microsoft and the EMC Corporation as clients.

“We’re doing the same thing that’s done in national parks: put a price on it so you get the right number of people,” Mr. Cenedella said.

Mr. Cenedella said that the company is not yet profitable, but is “cash flow positive.” The number of subscribers who hear about the site from word of mouth, he said, has nearly doubled, to 34 percent, in the last three years.

Mr. Cenedella, who was a senior vice president at HotJobs when the company was acquired by Yahoo, said TheLadders would expand in the coming months to include jobs with annual salaries of $75,000 or more. (Only about 10 percent of the roughly 150 million workers in the country earn $100,000 or more, he said, while 20 million earn from $75,000 to $100,000.) Even that lower salary threshold, however, is high enough to attract job candidates who will pay to see the listings.

Ms. Li, of Forrester, said that TheLadders and other fee-based online job boards could face difficult times as baby boomers retire and the job market opens up.

“Companies say they’re going to lose 30 percent of their forces over the next five years, and those will all be upper-echelon jobs,” she said. “So if you’re paying to look for jobs, in some ways it’s signaling that you’re not a very good candidate.”

Heather Hamilton, a staffing manager at Microsoft who uses the site to fill marketing positions, disagreed. “If you’re not serious, you’re not going to pay the money,” she said. “That’s a big part of why we’ve found TheLadders to be more fruitful than other job boards.”

Some of the big online job boards have also tried to aim at the highest-paying jobs. In 2000, Monster started ChiefMonster.com, which screened prospective job seekers to ensure that they were worthy of the best jobs, but the service failed to attract a following and Monster shut it down.

Other sites devoted to six-figure salaries and senior executives say that they, too, are thriving. ExecuNet, a service based in Norwalk, Conn., charges about $400 annually, or $39 monthly, for its online networking, industry data and job listings, among other things.

According to David B. Opton, the company’s chief executive, the business has about 25,000 subscribers, but their average income is $221,000 and the average age is 48. Job postings have increased about 30 percent over the last year, he said, and, perhaps as a result, ExecuNet’s membership has risen 15 percent.

Networking sites have become an increasingly important tool for companies looking to fill senior positions. LinkedIn, in particular, has emerged as a favorite trolling ground for corporate recruiters across the spectrum of job levels.

The online market for high-priced talent extends beyond full-time workers. Take HotGigs, for example. The company, which is based in Minneapolis, provides job listings for contract workers. In the three years since its debut, its customer base has grown to nearly 70,000 consultants who pay $100 yearly for the right to answer job listings
from about 19,000 companies and recruiters.

Doug Berg, the company’s chief executive, says the idea of paying to apply for a job is foreign to some people.

“We get a lot of people who e-mail us and say they shouldn’t have to pay for a job,” he said. “Our thing is, if you’re a professional consultant, you have to learn how to market yourself. Besides, if I didn’t charge, every wannabe in the world would come in.”

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MySpace Joins Google Alliance to Counter Facebook

By MIGUEL HELFT and BRAD STONE

MySpace and Bebo, two of the world’s largest social networking sites, today joined a Google-led alliance that is promoting a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks.

The alliance now presents a powerful counterweight to Facebook, which, after opening up its site to developers last spring, has persuaded thousands of them to create programs for its users. The addition of MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Bebo, the No.1 site in Britain, could also put pressure on Facebook to drop its own standard and join the alliance, called OpenSocial.

“OpenSocial is going to become the de facto standard for developers rights out of the gate,” said Chris DeWolfe, chief executive and co-founder of MySpace. Mr. DeWolfe said that developers using OpenSocial would be able to instantly reach 200 million users across various sites.

Google and others said they had invited other social networks, including Facebook, to participate in the alliance, whose existence was first reported Tuesday.

“The most important principle about openness is that everyone is invited to join,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.

Other members of the alliance include Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Ning, as well as the business software makers Oracle and Salesforce.com. The creators of several of the most popular programs on Facebook, including Slide, RockYou, iLike and Flixter, have announced their intention to write programs conforming to the OpenSocial standards.

The alliance is not likely to erode the popularity of Facebook or immediately alter the dynamics of the social networking market. But it could help revitalize the sites of some of its members, which have seen their social networks eclipsed by the popularity of MySpace and Facebook. Orkut, Google’s social network, for instance, is popular in Brazil and a few other countries, but has failed to gain traction in the United States.

Google may benefit in other ways. As other social networks draw more users, it could sell more advertising on those sites. TheInternet search giant already has a $900 million advertising partnership with MySpace, and sells advertising on various other social networks. Its ads often appear inside the applications created by third-party developers. Google and MySpace have been in discussions about developing a common set of programming standards for about a year, the companies said.

At a news conference today at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Joe Greenstein, the chief executive of Flixter, whose applications allow users to share movie recommendations, demonstrated his program running inside MySpace.

“We are excited about OpenSocial,” Mr. Greenstein said. But he added that Flixter was not planning to pressure Facebook, where millions of members use the company’s program, to adopt OpenSocial. Mr. Greenstein said that customizing his company’s application that runs on Facebook to run on OpenSocial had been a painless task.Facebook declined to comment.

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Web Marketing to a Segment Too Big to Be a Niche

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

ALTHOUGH 50 million people in the United States have some form of physical or mental disability, they spend money just as easily as others. But there are few efficient ways for advertisers to reach them, and that’s what a new Web site, Disaboom.com, hopes to change.

Disaboom is the brainchild of J. Glen House, who graduated from medical school after becoming a quadriplegic as a result of a skiing accident at 20. The site combines the social-networking features of Web sites like Facebook with information of interest to its constituency: medical news, career advice, dating resources and travel tips.

Disaboom.com went live Oct. 1 and hopes to attract more than a million unique visitors each month by the end of February and to double that over the next year. Mr. House and his investors took the company public in May, listing it on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board securities market.

“I don’t think mainstream advertisers realize the magnitude of the marketplace and how underserved it was,” said Howard Lieber, vice president for sales at Disaboom.

Among some advertisers who have already signed contracts with Disaboom are Netflix, Johnson & Johnson, Avis and Cricket Communications.

“I didn’t have to think real long and hard about it,” said Kathy LaPointe, mobility motoring manager at the Ford Motor Company, about the automaker’s decision to advertise prominently on the site. Ford is highlighting its $1,000 allowance for new car buyers to defray costs of adding adaptive equipment like wheelchair or scooter lifts, steering wheel knobs and pedal extensions.

Click-throughs from the ads to Ford’s Web site “have performed well above the benchmark,” Ms. LaPointe said. “This has been a huge success for us so far.”

To Ms. LaPointe, this is part advertising outlay and part public service.

“We’re in the business to make money and sell vehicles, but it’s also the right thing to do,” she said. “We can’t even measure the societal benefit” of the effort, she added. “We’re trying to make a difference in the world and help people.”

Marketing to people with disabilities may look great on paper, but it is not easy.

“We’re a very difficult group to reach,” said Eric Lipp, founder of the Open Doors Organization, a nonprofit group that consults with companies about the disability market. “People in the marketing world will say, ‘I can reach out to them,’ and I’m just telling you it’s not easy. We’re just spread out over all kinds of walks of life — from different races to different religions to different income levels and education.”

Still, Mr. Lipp, who has spoken with Disaboom representatives and plans to write articles for the site, said he was optimistic about the venture. “We would like to see something like this work,” he said. “You just have to build the right mouse trap.”

Disaboom paid DATA Inc., a computer design firm based in Denver, $280,000 to design the site, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. It also recently acquired lovebyrd.com, a dating Web site for people with disabilities, which Disaboom is folding into its own site. At the end of June, the company listed $2.2 million in cash.

“I think they’re right to get a big war chest of money,” Mr. Lipp said. “Now it’s about reaching out to the community.”

One person the site has contacted is Andrew J. Imparato, president of the American Association of People With Disabilities, which has 180,000 members. Disaboom has sponsored a mentoring event for the group and is trying to sign up all of the association’s members; in turn, Mr. Imparato hopes that people who are not members of his group will learn about it through Disaboom and join.

Mr. Imparato said Disaboom could serve as an important clearinghouse for people with disabilities, organizing them to make their voice resound more clearly with business and government.

“The disability community to a large degree is trying to get more visibility as a desirable constituency, whether you’re talking about customers with money in their pockets, or a talent pool to hire from, or voters,” Mr. Imparato said. “To a large degree, we feel like we’re invisible as a market and a political constituency.”

The number of adults with some form of disability is by all accounts growing, in part because the population is aging. Disability rates among older people are substantially higher, greater than 40 percent of the population 65 and over, compared with 19 percent of those between 16 and 64, according to census data.

The portion of the population with a disability will rise from one in five today to nearly one in four by 2030, according to Open Doors.

“They call us T.A.B.’s — the temporarily able-bodied,” said Mr. Lieber, who does not have a disability. “If you live long enough, you will get some physical limitation. You will eventually experience some of what these people are experiencing right now.”

People with mobility challenges are active consumers. A 2005 Harris Interactive study commissioned by Open Doors found that 69 percent of adults with disabilities — more than 21 million people — had traveled for either business or pleasure at least once in the preceding two years. In that same period, more than half had stayed in hotels, while 31 percent had booked at least one flight and 20 percent had rented a car. More than 75 percent of people with disabilities dine out at least once a week.

There are few media outlets that specifically aim at the disabled population, but advertisers like McDonald’s, Verizon Wireless, Sears and Honda have featured people with disabilities in their mainstream advertising. Target features disabled models in sales circulars; Kohl’s department stores use mannequins in wheelchairs in store displays.

Although some of these efforts may prompt accusations of political correctness, advocates for people with disabilities say they welcome the current crop of ads — which tend to feature people with disabilities prosaically in group situations — over the bromide-filled narratives about overcoming adversity that characterized earlier efforts.

“If you’re watching a commercial for a bank or a wireless phone carrier and you see someone in a wheelchair who is just part of the scene or background, it helps create a message that people with handicaps are integrated in society,” said Mr. Imparato, of the American Association of People With Disabilities. “Part of what that does is it normalizes having a disability.”

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In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, in India workmen like Mr. Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients’ computers.

So you can imagine Mr. Manohar’s wonder as he sat in a swiveling chair in front of a computer, dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Mr. Manohar’s page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on an Indian Web site called Babajob.com.

Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers — the world’s poor. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding poverty that surrounds them.

“In Redmond, you don’t see 7-year-olds begging on the street,” said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob’s founder, referring to Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington State, where he once worked. “In India, you can’t escape the feeling that you’re really lucky. So you ask, What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?”

Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive results for the poor, corporations have made India a laboratory for extending modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for instance, develops many of its ultralow-cost cellphones here. Citibank first experimented here with a special A.T.M. that recognizes thumbprints — to help slum dwellers who struggle with PINs. And Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global research group studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users. Babajob is a quintessential example of how the back-office operations in India have spawned poverty-inspired innovation.

The best-known networking sites in the industry connect computer-savvy elites to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects India’s elites to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can view Rajeev’s page, travel to the page of Rajeev’s chauffeur and see which of the chauffeur’s friends are looking for similar work.

Mr. Blagsvedt, now 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three years ago he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house policy research arm. The new team worked on many of the same complex problems as their peers in Redmond, but the employees here led very different lives outside the office than their counterparts in Redmond. They had servants and laborers. They read constant newspaper tales of undernourishment and illiteracy.

The company’s Indian employees were not seeing poverty for the first time, but they were now equipped with first-rate computing skills, and many felt newly empowered to help their society.

At the same time, Microsoft was plagued by widespread software piracy, which limited its revenue in India. Among other things, the company looked at low-income consumers as a vast and unexploited commercial opportunity, so it encouraged its engineers’ philanthropic urges.

Poverty became a major focus in Mr. Blagsvedt’s research office. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. In the course of that work, Mr. Blagsvedt stumbled upon an insight by a Duke University economist, Anirudh Krishna.

Mr. Krishna found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to find them. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.

Mr. Blagsvedt’s epiphany? “We need village LinkedIn!” he recalled saying, alluding to the professional networking site.

He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague built a social-networking site to connect Bangalore’s yuppies with its laborers. (The site, which Mr. Blagsvedt started this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore now, but he plans to spread it to other Indian cities and maybe globally.)

Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with computers. The wealthy potential employers would be reluctant to let random applicants tend their gardens or their newborns. To deal with the connectivity problem, Babajob pays anyone, from charities to Internet cafe owners, who finds job seekers and registers them online. (Babajob earns its keep from employers’ advertisements, diverting a portion of that to those who register job seekers.) And instead of creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the process by which Indians hire in real life: through chains of personal connections.

In India, a businessman looking for a chauffeur might ask his friend, who might ask his chauffeur. Such connections provide a kind of quality control. The friend’s chauffeur, for instance, will not recommend a hoodlum, for fear of losing his own job.

To re-create this dynamic online, Babajob pays people to be “connectors” between employer and employee. In the example above, the businessman’s friend and his chauffeur would each earn the equivalent of $2.50 if they connected the businessman with someone he liked.

The model is gaining attention, and praise. A Bangalore venture capitalist, when told of Babajob, immediately asked to be put in touch with Mr. Blagsvedt. And Steve Pogorzelski, president of the international division of Monster.com, the American jobs site, said, “Wow” when told of the company. “It is an important innovation because it opens up the marketplace to people of socioeconomic levels who may not have the widest array of jobs available to them.”

Mr. Krishna, the Duke economist, called it a “very significant innovation,” but he cautioned that the very poor might not belong to the social networks that would bring them to Babajob, even on the periphery.

In its first few months, the company has drummed up job seekers on its own, sending workers into the streets with fliers promising employment.

To find potential employers, in addition to counting on word of mouth among those desperate for maids and laborers, Babajob is also relying on Babalife, the company’s parallel social networking site for the yuppie elite. People listed on Babalife will automatically be on Babajob, too.

So far, more than 2,000 job seekers have registered. The listings are a portrait of India’s floating underclass, millions and millions seeking a few dollars a day to work as chauffeurs, nannies, gardeners, guards and receptionists.

A woman named Selvi Venkatesh was a typical job seeker. “I am really in need of a job as our residential building collapsed last month in Ejipura,” she said, referring to a building collapse that killed two people, including an infant, in late July, according to The Times of India.

In Mr. Blagsvedt’s apartment one morning, Mr. Manohar, the painter, professed hope.

He earns $100 a month. Jobs come irregularly, so he often spends up to three months of the year idle. Between jobs, he borrows from loan sharks to feed his wife and children. The usurers levy 10 percent monthly interest, enough to make a $100 loan a $314 debt in one year.

Mr. Manohar does not want his children to know his worries, or his life. He wants them to work in a nice office, so he spends nearly half his income on private schools for them. That is why he was at Babajob in a swiveling chair, staring at a computer and dreaming of more work.

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Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for 1.6% Stake in Facebook

By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 24 — Microsoft has won a high-profile technology industry battle with Google and Yahoo to invest in the social networking upstart Facebook.

The two companies said on Wednesday that Microsoft would invest $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. The investment values the three-year-old Facebook, which will bring in about $150 million in revenue this year, at $15 billion.

The deal ends two months of jockeying between three major Internet players for the right to invest in and forge close ties with Facebook.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will sell the banner ads appearing on Facebook outside of the United States, splitting the revenue with it. Last year, Microsoft struck a deal with Facebook to run banner ads on the site in the United States through 2011.

The astronomical valuation for Facebook is evidence that Microsoft executives believed they could not afford to lose out on the deal. Google appears to be building a dominant position in the race to serve advertisements online. Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been trying to match and in some cases block Google’s plans, even if that effort is costly.

“We are now stepping outside what is typically a business decision,” said Rob Enderle, the founder of the strategy concern Enderle Group. “This was almost personal. I wouldn’t want to be the executive that’s on the losing side at either firm.”

A Google spokesman said the company had no comment. Facebook is planning to comment on the deal later today.

Representatives of Facebook say the investment will allow it to add employees, expand overseas and aggressively develop its own advertising system that will tailor ads to the personal preferences users make public on their Facebook pages. Facebook is expected to introduce such an ad network at an event in New York next month.

The Microsoft investment throws the value of the holdings of Facebook investors into the stratosphere. Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old Facebook founder who dropped out of Harvard to build the company, owns a 20 percent share which is now valued at $3 billion. Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that invested $12.7 million in May 2005 and owns 11 percent of Facebook, now holds stock worth $1.65 billion.

The high valuation also represents a belief that Facebook is creating an important new operating system — one that exists on the Web instead of on personal computers. In May, it opened its platform, inviting other companies and third party developers to create tools for the site and share in the advertising revenues.

The move unleashed a flurry of activity around the social network. More than 4,000 applications, like games and music-sharing tools, have since been created for the site, which in turn has accelerated Facebook’s membership growth. The company says it now has more than 42 million members and will exceed 60 million members by the end of the year.

“Once a social operating system takes over a country it’s like it becomes the native language of that country,” said Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist who is bullish on Facebook and notes that Google’s Orkut dominates Brazil, Friendster dominates the Philippines and Facebook is becoming the dominant forum in the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

Facebook boosters say that social networking represents the future of online activity.. Advertisers are attracted to these properties because they offer an opportunity to aim ads to particular users interested in their product or service.

Mr. Lorenzen and other Silicon Valley investors are often dismissive of MySpace, Facebook’s larger rival, which has more than 110 million active users and is owned by the News Corporation. “MySpace is not based on authentic identities. Facebook is based on who you really are and who your friends really are. That is who marketers really want to reach, not the fantasy you that lives on MySpace and uses a photo of a model,” he said.

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Networks Start to Offer TV on the Web

By DAVID POGUE

Music and TV were lazily paddling their canoes down Prosperity Creek when Music suddenly heard a deafening roar ahead. “Help! What’s happening?” cried Music — but it was too late. The canoe tumbled over the Internet Falls, knocking Music upside-down into the churning vortex.

TV, following at a short distance, was determined to avoid Music’s fate. “I shall go with the current and not fight it,” vowed TV. And with only seconds to spare, TV threw every shred of brainpower and muscle into avoiding its doom.

End of Chapter 1.

Now, nobody knows how that story will turn out. But everybody knows that fewer people are watching network TV with every passing year. This year, the networks have mounted their first counterattack. In addition to short mini-videos for the short-attention-span generation, they’re putting full-length free on-demand episodes online. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CW are all in the game, with surprisingly pleasant results.

In general, you can catch the four or five most recent episodes of a show online, starting the morning after broadcast.

Techies, of course, have something much better. Using free BitTorrent technology, they can find and illegally download almost any episode of any recent TV show to their computers. (Just don’t get caught. Some Internet providers are starting to shut off the service of BitTorrent fans.)

You can also buy TV shows at Apple’s iTunes store, for $2 an episode without ads. But this approach, too, sticks in the craw of some networks; NBC, for example, has chafed at Apple’s terms, and its shows may disappear from iTunes in December. So what’s it like to watch TV on the networks’ Web sites?

If you have the required fast Internet connection, the picture and sound quality are excellent. It’s all on-demand, too; you can start playing the shows whenever you feel like it. (According to ABC’s research, 77 percent of online viewers are catching an episode that they missed on TV.)

There are some ads, and you can’t skip over them. Fortunately, compared with regular TV, the online ads are scarce indeed. At each break, you generally have to watch only one 30-second commercial — and there’s nothing to stop you from checking your e-mail messages or Dilbert.com while it plays.

And then there’s Joost.

Joost (“juiced,” get it?) is the latest brainchild of the two Scandinavian entrepreneurs who first rocked the record industry with Kazaa (free music for all!) and then the phone industry with Skype (free phone calls for all!). Joost gives your Mac or PC on-demand access to more than 150,000 episodes of TV shows and Web videos (free TV for all!). And last week, Joost threw open its doors; you no longer need a private invitation to download its player software from www.joost.com.

Here it is, then: your Fall 2007 Guide to Online TV, starring Joost, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

JOOST 1.0 BETA Joost is a great concept. The social-networking aspects are especially promising: you can type-chat with other viewers, send links to good shows, and so on.

In some shows, ads play before or during an episode (maximum length: 60 seconds); in others, small ads pop up in the corner of the screen something like those transparent network logos.

Joost’s video quality ranges from O.K. to blotchy. The software is beautiful, but its unlabeled controls are confusing. And Joost’s central organizing concept, “channels,” is also bewildering; although the shows play on demand, they’re also part of a lineup, and you’re often told that certain shows are “Coming Up”—although you can make your own channels, too.

Finally, there’s an awful lot of junk on Joost. Some of the shows are recognizable series from CBS, MTV, VH1, Paramount Pictures, CNN and Comedy Central, like “CSI” variations, “Kid Nation” and a lot of cartoons. But there’s also a lot of Web-video filler. The channels include Audi TV, Australian Food TV and the Circus Channel.

And then there are ones you’ve never heard of.

ABC ABC offers 17 of its most popular series online: “Dancing With the Stars,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Ugly Betty” and so on. If you have a high-powered computer, you can even watch six of them in high definition, which looks sensational.

Each show has about four ad breaks, indicated by a tick mark on the show’s scroll bar. You must watch one ad before viewing any other segment of the show. Once you’ve paid those dues, you can freely jump around in the new segment, rewind and so on. Each show is sponsored by a single national advertiser, and the ads are often interactive. (ABC shows are also available at video.aol.com.) Over all, ABC really has its online act together.

CBS This network’s offerings include a generous 22 series, including “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” some episodes of “CSI,” “How I Met Your Mother” and a couple of soaps. There’s no whole-show scroll bar, so you can’t skip to the last section without slogging through the first, second and third.

CBS is also the most liberal distributor of shows on the Internet. You can find much the same stuff on iTunes, Joost, AOL and so on.

NBC An ad or two appears at the beginning of each episode, at the end and at the regular commercial breaks in the middle.

Unfortunately, the selection isn’t great. Only 13 series await, including “The Office,” “30 Rock” and “Heroes,” although NBC says that more are coming. And you can’t shrink the NBC player’s window down and park it in a corner of your screen so you can watch while you crunch numbers, as you can with its rivals.

FOX Fox’s effort is labeled “beta,” and it shows; I ran into glitches on both Mac and Windows computers. Still, everything plays fine: the most recent three episodes each of “The Simpsons,” “24” and 13 other shows are here. Fox uses the same tick-mark scroll bar as ABC. But an ad also appears before the show, and ads appear in the browser window beside the “TV screen.”

Speaking of NBC and Fox: stay tuned for Hulu.com. When it opens later this month, it will offer full episodes from these networks and others.

Over all, it’s great to see the arrival of online TV episodes that are crisp, clear, current, legal and free. But there are three reasons this development may not make much difference in the big picture.

First, the selection is puny. Each network offers only a fraction of its list, and for a window of only a few weeks. As long as the networks refuse to offer a better-stocked catalog — and a more permanent one — the world will flock to any service that does, like BitTorrent.

Second, you can’t download shows; you can only watch them streamed in real time. You can’t save them, put them on your iPod or burn them to DVD. (There’s hope on this point, however: this month, NBC will begin testing free episodes that you can download to your laptop to watch within a week.)

Finally — and this is the big one — almost nobody wants to watch TV on a computer screen.

Oh, sure, there are various wired and wireless ways to get the computer’s image onto your TV in the living room. But they’re clumsy, expensive and, for most people, not worth the bother. After all these years of pundits assuring us that the TV and the Internet would one day merge, it still hasn’t happened.

In other words, free online episodes are a reasonable attempt by the TV networks to avoid being swamped by the Internet. But will it be enough to keep TV’s head above water? That chapter has yet to be written.

Source: New York Times